


Oh, Venegeful One/ Oh, Shining One

by Amurleopard123, nekojita



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Inspired by Fanfiction, Inspired by The Sandman, Oneshot, Other, Violence?? i guess??, Weirdness, idk what this is, vengeance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 16:06:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19771708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amurleopard123/pseuds/Amurleopard123, https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekojita/pseuds/nekojita
Summary: This is based on Nekojita's beautiful Sandman AU, The First Breath. Here's the link, you don't need to read it to understand but it's better if you do: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9149917A Oneshot based around Tisiphone and her grisly work. Only because I wanted more Renee :)The winds tear through the poisoned forest, calling out their mourning wails of pain. Someone is walking down that path, A woman of fire and bronze. A woman of revenge. A woman of Fury.





	Oh, Venegeful One/ Oh, Shining One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nekojita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekojita/gifts).



A woman walked along paths of dead leaves. She wore a jacket of green canvas, and a flowing white dress bright as the halo of strands surrounding her face, falling to the tops of her shoulders, pale pinks, blues, yellows and mint greens running in a dripping ombre down the skirt, the ends of her dress also dyed with the same rust-brown that streaked the tips of her hair. Her feet were clad in black converse, no jewellery adorning her pale, statuesque face. Her nails were painted, a mirror-like bronze, a belt and necklace the only accessories.   
She was ethereal.  
Justice  
Murder Avenged  
Tisiphone

Certain places always carry a melancholy air of tragedy. Whether it be car parks at midnight, dim light glancing off the forest of metal, or a small airport in the early morning, fluorescence chasing the few harried passengers through the halls filled with off-licences with doors locked and shutters down.   
This place was haunted for a different reason.   
Feral dogs and cats had fought and spat at each other as those who ruled them ran in terror from the invisible enemy chasing them.  
Birds didn’t sing.  
There weren’t any left.   
Every now and then, she came upon the skeletal corpse of an animal, flesh long sunk into decay. Some of them still had scraps of collars, names inscribed in a mockery of her language.  
The encroaching tendrils of mother nature, reclaiming herself could be seen all around the park, in the pine needles that littered the ground in layers of green and yellow, and pinecones resting upon the ground like grenades. Grass pushed up from below cracked cobblestones, dandelions blowing gently in the wind. Roots of trees as old as the first machine veined the ground. The occasional sapling lay across what remained across the paths, torn and dead from frost and wind.  
None of this felt alive.  
None of this felt welcoming.  
All of it pressed with absolute and oppressive hostility, bark twisted into screaming faces, with rage and pain and fire, hands grasping at the sky, which greeted them with toxic grey and poison. But she was almost there.  
The echoes of suffering around her did nothing to widen her eyes, or slow her pace. She’d seen it so many times before, had been horrified, bound with the sadness of human empathy and immortal euphoria. Now she had deadened herself to everything that she felt before she became vengeance.   
Yet her old position still haunted her. She may be a spirit of ill luck, calamity and war, but she remembered when she was exalted and praised as a muse, offerings burned in reverence, not fear.   
But she had nothing now, but to be the one to cast judgement and to try to get there in time to protect.  
Her destination opened outwards before her in a tangle of fence and rusted barbed wire, smothering scraps of cloth and spots of old blood. She didn’t bother to cut through the barbed wire. She simply leapt, swift as a doe, before landing, improbably, gracefully, beyond the 4-metre high fence. She carried onwards, the sight of a yellow Ferris wheel looming above her.  
She was almost there.  
Taking a sharp right, her gait loaded with dangerous purpose, she walked towards an outbuilding, next to the once cheerful face of a caterpillar rollercoaster, paint sloughing off its smile in terrifying irony. She didn’t even pause at the door, simply pushing it aside as if it were paper, revealing one silhouette, looming and stooped, and three more at their feet, horribly, horribly small.  
It took so little time.  
Such a horrifying reality compared to the melodrama of long, drawn-out fighting scenes that humans dreamed and told stories with. No one wanted to believe that the string of utter coincidences that caused their consciousness to be brought about in the first place, taking hundreds upon thousands of years, could be over in less than ten seconds.  
The large shadow solidified in the sudden light, a tall, young man, his eyes wild, his face in a twisted grin. He held only a small silver knife, one which had been used on the walls already, covered with names. She caught a glimpse of a familiar name, then turned on her prey.  
Like father, like son.  
The man reared up with shock, anger and bluster, ready to question what she thought she was doing.   
Then she was on him, bronze nails as long as claws tearing through the thick layers of his coat with ease, splitting the skin and muscle beneath with the resounding sound of scissors cutting through velvet.   
He gasped, hand going to his abdomen, the yellow of exposed fat already being obscured by blood, the dark red tint of muscle and squirming veins barely covered. He lumbered forward in a clumsy swipe, and she spun away, short, salt white hair fanning outwards like a stream of moonlight.  
He paused, dazzled, like a bear rearing before a truck, and then he was on the floor, lines splitting him from neck to groin.   
She snarled with savage delight at her kill and walked slowly to his side, plunging her claws through his broad frame, leaving a hole in his chest and his heart speared on her fingers.  
She drank, taking deep joy in her job achieved, blood re-dyeing the ends of her hair a bright, sticky dark red.  
When she had taken all she needed from him, she put her gruesome prize in a beaten bronze jar at her side, then she turned to the hunched figures, barely recognisable as the children they had been. Two were still and cold. The last was curled up in anguish and pain. There was no saving it. She knelt and carefully pulled a small bottle from the pocket of her olive green coat. It glimmered with a strange opalescent light, what remained of the sun glittering off it, from dust covered windows cracked with age.  
She held it to the noses of each child, evanescent light pouring from them in a stream, flashes of images and sounds in golden, syrupy webs.   
She was glad that though her responsibilities as Mneme had been passed to another, she still possessed enough power to take memories.   
The last child alive shuddered and relaxed as she drew the bottle away. She knew it wouldn’t have survived, no matter if she’d paid it time and power to take it somewhere where it wouldn’t die of exposure. It had already been too close to death when it had called her, in frantic desperation.   
Tisiphone would only come if you were far enough gone, that consequences were mere vapour in the shadow of your own terror and hate.  
She could only save you, if you were strong enough to save yourself for long enough.  
And this child had given up, the instant it saw its fellows lapse into oblivion.   
She called in a way that she knew Mneme could follow. She shouted her old name, the name she had cast off when Tisiphone had granted her her position, the name that kept a bond between the two.  
It took barely a minute before she was there, skin dark as burnt cinnabar, hair in corkscrews of wine-dark red.  
Wordlessly, Tisiphone held out the bottle and the memories within. Mneme studied them and then pulled three pearls from a silk pouch hanging at her wrist. She flicked the bottle open, and tossed the beads inside, the mist curling and sinking into the tiny gems. Turning fully to Tisiphone, she spoke with a voice like dry paper.  
“Are they in there?”  
Tisiphone nodded and turned into the outhouse. She gave a sharp nod to the young figure with auburn hair who stood in the corner, icy blue eyes watching, dressed in ash and shadow. He barely acknowledged her, his pale face turned towards figures she could not see. Kicking aside the body of her kill, she strode back and forth, carrying the delicate corpses one by one, for Memory to take away. Finally, she dragged the man who had incurred her wrath out by his hair.   
Mneme was as impassive as she, to see the damage wreaked on him.  
Tisiphone spoke for the first time in days, her voice like rusted swords and liquid gold.   
“Make them forget him. All of them.”  
Mneme sighed “And you will preserve him here, like the rest?’  
Tisiphone smiled with ivory hooked teeth “I will punish him as I see fit. That is my duty, as is yours to remember all. He killed. He is under my domain. You cannot interfere, nor will I let you, despite our connection.”  
Mneme reached out, mournfully. “He was my brother, why can I not take him?”  
Tisiphone snorted. “He is not your brother. You are immortal. You must learn to let go of your attachments. Otherwise, I’ll send you back into that shed, where I found you.”  
Mneme seemed to realise her pleading went unheard. She sighed and gathered the bodies.   
“I’ll see you at the next slaughter.”  
The hint of reproach in her words made Tisiphone smile gently. She was kindred with the Ravens and Crows, swirling around the dead places of this world, and sometimes it did well to remind even immortals of who she was and what she could do. And at the same time, the grace she extended to them by granting them favours every now and then, saving a loved one, or family.  
Mneme walked back towards the entrance of the park, the dead autumn leaves stirred into a whirlwind, cloaking her.  
Then she was gone, leaving Tisiphone to the empty, haunted ruin.  
With dispassionate care, she picked up the body, letting wings of bronze extend from the middle of her back in a spiral of spear sharp pinions, beating down, hurling her towards her destination with delicious speed.   
The landscape stretched desolate before her, bare skeletons of trees clawing upwards in anguish, poisoned by the waves emanating from the concrete cube several miles ahead.   
The cube where humans had tried to harness the kind of power that drove stars to burn and collapse, and in a fit of hubris had killed the land, salting the barren fields and leaving their own to mutate and die, their bodies decomposed and broken down into little more than soup.  
But her destination was elsewhere.  
She could foresee disasters for a reason  
She had cultivated this forest here for a reason.  
She had kept this wounded land festering, for a reason.  
She reached one of the edges of the forest, where the pines only grew twenty metres high. Landing with the grace of a brazen hummingbird, she looked towards the copse of small redwoods, their bark the colour of Mneme’s skin, and smiled at the twisted figures that were barely visible, petrified in wood.  
It was time for her to begin.  
She cast his body down, and first, took his heart from its container. She planted it, like a sapling, into the poison dirt. She grasped a coral snake from where it wrapped around her waist, only visible before as a belt of snakeskin, letting it coil down her arm. She pressed gently at the base of its head, and let the drops of smoke dark venom drop down to the sapling.  
She turned to the body this time, taking another of her pets, another snake, that resided around her neck, a gift from Death when they had all danced together on the grave barrows, her, her sisters and him, fiery hair catching the light in the same way as their wings and claws.  
Now pressing at its moon-like scales, it obediently opened its mouth like its brother, letting drops of ruby blood fall from its teeth.   
Onto the man.  
The viscous drops sank into his skin and he gasped.  
She lifted him by his neck with impossible strength, and set him down where his heart lay planted.  
Branches and bark, like armoured plate, sprang from the earth, twisting into a cage.   
His feet were trapped in place as twigs began to stretch like webs across his legs, leaving the scales of bark to fill the gaps, like a bleeding wound.  
His screams did nothing to lighten her apathy. She had built this forest of souls as a prison, any who broke her laws to rest here for as long as the starved ground supported them. Then they would live a long, painful eternity.  
She turned, a fury, caught in the sunset, dying light glittering off wings and claws of bronze, eyes of gold, the tips of her salt white hair dyed red with blood, old and new.   
Her pets coiled around her and she soared  
Into the trees  
Into the sky  
Into life.  
Where a woman waited for her, on the balcony of a New York penthouse suite, the city’s lights casting the sky into shades of blue velvet and gold.  
A crystal champagne glass sat in her porcelain hand, hair of spun gold tumbling down her back, in a dress as light as summer, and with an expression of sharp, wistful intelligence.  
Aglaea.  
Shining one.  
Beauty.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to ANYONE who decides to read this weird product of my procrastinating a Project Qualification. Comments and Kudos appreciated! (The mandatory like and subscribe box is now checked)  
> Hope you go and read the Fic that inspired this. Also, hope my editing is good enough :)
> 
> ps, if any of you drew the convoluted connection that the scene is based, loosely, on Chernobyl. I am SO sorry to anyone who actually has been there or knows about the area, I couldn't find reliable sources as to the locations of the places described in relation to each other, so I made stuff up and guessed. Feel free to inform me in a comment :).


End file.
